


Saw: Hoffman's Game

by devilclone



Category: Saw (Movies), Saw (video games)
Genre: Corruption, Depression, Gen, Horror, Implied/Referenced Torture, Rain
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 18:06:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 16,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29175378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilclone/pseuds/devilclone
Summary: New York is ravaged by some of the worst storms in the city's history, and the Jigsaw killer remains at large.Mendoza and Samson are the latest cops from the corrupt Metropolitan PD to get caught up in the twisted game. Have they remained honourable enough to avoid Jigsaw's touch, or has the corruption they serve marked them for John Kramer's terrifying and deadly "rehabilitation" program?Detective Hoffman steps up his campaign against Amanda to become Kramer's golden boy and to secure the Jigsaw title before the cancer takes his mentor. Traps are tampered with, innocent people are tested, and the whole game comes under serious threat by a jacked-up MPD, looking to put an end to Jigsaw once and for all.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 6





	1. Waters of Life

A shitty November in New York City…

The first thing Aiden became aware of as he slipped back into consciousness was the obstruction in his throat and the inability to swallow. There was something large down there, long, like a tube. It ran down God knows how far into his body via his mouth, and vanished upward, towards the ceiling.

His jaw hurt from being wedged open. He opened his eyes but the space was pitch black. He instinctively tried to call out but could achieve nothing more than a series of muffled grunts. The tube was too large and tough for him to bite through. The only air he could get was through his nose and he began to hyperventilate.

He was restrained. Legs and body strapped tight into a solid chair so he wasn’t going anywhere, but his hands were both free. The panic rose as he realized he was completely stuck, and this thing in his mouth and throat wasn’t going anywhere. His hands reached up to wrench the tube from his body, but they stopped short, blocked by a steel framework encasing both his head and the tube in heavy Perspex, precluding extraction. 

_What the fuck… what the fuck is this??_

His hands felt out desperately in front of him, patting the top of a small table. On the table lay a kitchen knife, a 5-inch utility knife with a narrow blade. Aiden gripped it and stabbed blindly in the dark at the tube, hitting nothing but solid steel. What he hadn’t noticed was that the knife was threaded with a thin wire through a hole in the handle. Aiden’s slashing and wild waving of the blade tugged at the wire until… clink!

Somewhere in the room a small metal locking pin was yanked from its housing, and the chain-reaction began. The lights snapped on; hot, powerful construction lighting that suddenly seared Aiden’s retinas. He squeezed his eyes shut until he adjusted. 

He was stripped to the waist and seated in a heavy wooden chair, fastened in place with thick reinforced leather strapping wrapped around his legs, his waist, and his bare chest. Although his hands were free, he was very secure and could find no buckles or other release mechanisms.

His head was fixed in place by the impenetrable box, but there was a mirror positioned in front of him which provided a clear view of his bare chest and stomach. On his lower stomach someone had drawn a dotted line, about three inches across. 

_No, no, no, what is this?_

His eyes darted left and right, desperate to gain some bearings but he didn’t recognise the location. The room was industrial, a factory of some kind. Rows of shabby, rusted lockers, dusty old hardhats, and faded workplace safety signs riveted to the walls. The place had been abandoned for a long time judging by the dust and cobweb accumulation. 

Mounted on the wall in front of Aiden, a crappy old cathode-ray TV sparked to life with a burst, and a VCR clicked and whirred. Through the snow of static the face of a puppet turned towards the camera and stared straight down the barrel, its bulbous dead eyes brimming with hand-crafted menace.

“Hello Aiden,”

_Jesus, that voice…_

“In a fit of comedown insanity, you stomped your pregnant girlfriend until she miscarried, mere weeks from term. The attending physician’s report stated that the child’s body had the appearance of suffering a severe traffic collision. The child’s mother, Erin Daye, killed herself a week after she was released from hospital. You should have spent at least the next 15 years in jail for this crime, but through an error in filing you were handed a hall pass, receiving instead only 400 hours community service…”

The screen filled with medical reports, photographs of Aiden, of Erin, of the dead premature baby. 

_Oh fuck._

Aiden knew what was happening. Everyone knew the Jigsaw Killer’s MO: the creepy video puppet, the Darth Vader voice, the self-righteous judgement delivered as monologue. 

_I’m in a fucking Jigsaw trap…_

The puppet in the video continued:

“As you can feel, and now see,” The vision on-screen flicked to an X-ray shot of a seated man and a long tube running from the ceiling, into his mouth, all the way down into his stomach cavity. “The tube that is causing your jaw to ache right now is connected to a water tank housed in the ceiling above you. As soon as this message ends, the tank will open and the water will rush down the tube and into your stomach. The internal pressure will build in seconds, and your insides will be crushed until you literally burst open at the weakest point: your throat. You cannot survive this. However, you can stop the pressure from becoming lethal...” 

_What’s he gonna make me cut off to survive this?_

“On a small table in front of you, you will find a knife. Please, watch your fingers. The blade has been honed laser-sharp to aid you in the task ahead. I hope you haven’t done anything silly like try to cut yourself out of the chair. You will only dull the knife’s edge, making your job that much more difficult.”

Aiden held the knife up to eye-height: he had indeed snapped off the tip of the blade and taken several small chips out of the edge with his furious thrashing.

_Oh, shit._

“A well-placed incision leading into the gut will create an exit for the water, but there are two fundamental physical realities you need to understand in order to pull this off. First, too small an incision will result in build-up and eventual explosive decompression and you will leave your guts on the floor and die in this room…” 

A cartoon image of a man with no shirt appears on screen. Drawn across his stomach is a dotted line with a label reading, “2 inches minimum, 3 to be sure.” An unseen hand dragged a knife (the knife Aiden now held in his hand) across the cartoon dotted line as example.

“Second, you need to have made the incision prior to your body filling with water, otherwise you will choke and die before you can drain yourself. Once the tank is empty, a mechanism will release you from the chair and from the steel framework around your head. You will be able to remove the tube and exit the room via the door to your left. But before you do, I want you to know the feeling of helplessness you imposed upon Erin, and the physical anguish you caused when you decided you didn’t want that child any-more. Are you able to withstand an emergency caesarean, Aiden? You have seconds only to make your choice.”

The TV clicked off, a hidden mechanism above Aiden began to whir, and the sound of gulping water was complemented with a rush of cool liquid into his stomach. It had begun. 

He wasn’t ready for this. It was happening too fast. 

_How the fuck am I supposed to cut myself open? I can’t do this!_

The pressure was building, fast. 

He was sweating so much now that he could barely hold onto the handle of the knife. He wiped his hands down on his pants and renewed his grip on the tool. His stomach was starting to distend. He didn’t have long before it reached critical mass and killed him, no matter what he did or didn’t do.

He poked his bare stomach lightly with the knife. The broken tip was no longer going to simply slide into his flesh. This thing was going to need to be stabbed in, hard.

Aiden took a breath in through his nose, closed his eyes, and plunged…

He pulled it at the last second, chickening out. The knife cut him, but nowhere near deep enough. Aiden screamed (as much a person can scream with their mouth full of rubber tubing), and thrust it down again, harder, deeper. The knife went in half an inch. The sensation was intense, agonizing. Aiden’s eyes betrayed his cowardice and he released the knife, hands shaking like an alcoholic. It stuck out of his body, this alien object. It didn’t belong in him, it belonged in the knife drawer! He shouldn’t be here… he should be safe in a cosy jail cell somewhere!

_Fucking Jesus, why didn’t they just put me in jail? WHY AM I HERE?_

His stomach was stretching now. The terror of what was happening inside him overrode the horror of the external and he slammed both his hands down onto the protruding knife handle. The blade rammed deep into his stomach cavity. That was stage one. The next stage was going to be the hardest part: the actual incision. This would require Aiden to have to mental fortitude of a samurai performing seppuku. But this was precisely what Aiden was lacking. 

He tried. The slicing sensation was too intense for him. Perhaps the hole he’d made was enough? What did the puppet say? Explosive decompression?

_This isn’t fair! I don’t deserve this!_

Aiden tore the knife from his stomach with an agonized grunt. Instantly, water began to jet out of the hole. Aiden’s eyes widened in horror at the sight. The water pressure was growing and the jet became stronger. He felt the electric jolts of agony as the edges of the wound started to tear away from each other and the gaping wound in his body widened further. The pain was unbearable, yet it continued to build. 

Aiden was so full of adrenaline that his fainting trigger was disabled and he observed as the small hole in his stomach 

suddenly 

tore 

wide 

open.

His guts exploded, bursting out of their safe housing onto his lap and splattering onto the floor below in a torrent of meaty slop and red water. 

Aiden’s body wound down. His organs – those still in his body – slowed and switched themselves off, his muscles relaxed beyond his control. The pain faded and he felt light, ‘floaty’, in his restraints. His lap was covered in his own intestines and undigested breakfast and shit and blood, but he somehow had lost the capacity to care. He was no longer attached to his physical form, and he exhaled his last, mercifully free of the despicable pain.

The tank in the ceiling ran empty, lowering the internal ball float. Another mechanism engaged, and with a series of metallic clinking and clunking the framework around Aiden’s head popped open as did the restraints on the chair. His body slumped forward, landing in the pile of his own entrails, the tube sliding clear of his throat, swinging gently above the pile of deconstructed human.

The lock on the heavy steel door buzzed and the bolts slid from their housings. Aiden was liberated from the trap, as promised.


	2. Eyes on Target

It was quiet out today. Another morning of merciless wind and downpour. Poppy’s newsstand wavered and wobbled in the wind, the awning above providing minimal protection from the rain. Pages flitted and flapped under the chunks of brick used to weigh them down from the onslaught of this rabid November weather. Poppy sat on his signature stool, pulling his lapels in close to his neck against the wind, lap wrapped in an old hand-knitted blanket, made with love for him by Mrs Poppy (God rest her soul) that one crazy January back in ‘85.

The streets may have been dead but the headlines were very much alive and screaming.

Any headline containing the word “Jigsaw” was a screamer. It was the key to selling out papers at the stands, and it stimulated the miserly online crowd to click through the paywalls to get to the guts of the story. 

Today, every headline of every paper contained that word:

_The Wall Street Journal_  
**NYSE dip blamed on Jigsaw murders**

_The New York Times_  
**Jigsaw 2.0: it begins again**

_The New York Daily News_  
**Jigsaw: the killer that never sleeps**

_The New York Post_  
**Jigsaw Murders Continue**

_Newsday_  
**Pray for our city – Jigsaw is back**

Carmen Mendoza popped in another pellet of gum, chewing hard through the nicotine cravings. Her jaw ached; this was the fifth piece she’d added to the ever-growing wad in her mouth and it was beginning to feel like chewing through setting concrete.

The ache in her jaw was nothing compared to the ass-ache she was getting from the city right now. Her and every other cop. The citizens were panicked and up in arms. Accidental shootings and mistaken identity killings were through the roof. Everyone was terrified of becoming Jigsaw’s next victim, and in a city and a time like this – a city that pumped vice through its corrupted veins – everyone was a target. The whole situation had been exacerbated since the Full Disclosure Report on the first four trap killings went to air; the entire country was suddenly wrapped up in Jigsaw-fever. New Yorkers bristled in fear and rage while the rest of the nation, and the world, salivated at the prospect of more graphic details coming out of the besieged city.

“Oh, shit… Carm.”

Wesley ‘Sam’ Samson handed his partner a copy of The Daily Truth. “We made the front page.”

Mendoza spat the uncomfortable wad out into the trash can next to her and snatched the tabloid rag up. There they were, detectives Mendoza and Samson, on scene at the most recent Jigsaw testing ground. The headline bragged: 

**NY’s finest are ‘this close’ to shutting Jigsaw down…for good**

She slammed the paper into the trash and swore. This was bad. 

Samson agreed, “This is bad, Carm.”

“Anderson, that cocksucker.” Whipper Anderson was the Truth’s head hatchet-man and held a long-standing feud with the NYPD, and more recently the newly formed Metropolitan Police Department. The MPD was a grand experiment in developing an entirely self-contained justice unit in one location – a full spectrum detective team, CSI, labs, a morgue and SWAT. The MPD’s arrest rate was impressive, but it had become plagued by corruption in recent years and it was now mired in controversy as one of the least popular public services in the city.

This positive spin towards the police by the Truth was custom-written to provoke Jigsaw into aiming his sights at them. The last cops that hit a front page over the Jigsaw killings ended up torn apart in his traps, and it was Anderson who had published that story also. Now it looked like it was Mendoza and Samson’s turn.

Poppy suddenly animated from his rickety old stool. “Hey! That’s two dollars, ya thieving bums!” Samson dipped his hand into his pocket and handed Poppy the change he retrieved. “Yeah, yeah. Sorry Poppy. Rough day at the office.”

Poppy accepted the money, arranged it neatly in his change belt. “You know who’s having a worse day? Us fuckin’ civilians. It’s us he keeps putting in those godforsaken contraptions. So yeah, between Jigsaw and the weather and all these goddamn potholes it’s a wonder there’s anybody on the streets at all these days.”

“Hey, we’ve lost people too, Poppy. We’re working on it, OK? Believe me.” Samson maintained a cooler head than his perpetually enraged partner, but the pressure was mounting and he found it increasingly difficult to stay polite. But Poppy was an institution on this corner, and a stronger source of bankable intel than a hundred tweaking CIs, so Samson didn’t want to piss him off. “Keep your ear to the ground, will ya? We’re gonna need everyone on deck we wanna clean this shit up.”

Poppy waved him off nonchalantly. “You know me. I hear it all.”

Samson pulled his wallet out of his pocket and counted out a handful of notes. “Eh, you know what, Pop? Give ‘em all to me. Every copy. Don’t be holdin’ out on me neither. I know you got backups in the crate under there…”

Poppy hungrily counted up the cash as Samson struggled with two armloads of the shitty tabloid rag, slamming them all in the trash on top of Mendoza’s gum. 

Back in the car, Mendoza fumed. Samson slurped on the barely-drinkable hot brown water sold as coffee from the Bodega Mejor, wincing as it went down. “Fucking bodega coffee…” These were not happy days, and bad coffee did nothing to ameliorate the atmosphere of ill-will blanketing the population. 

Mendoza hadn’t been happy since she joined the MPD. Samson was a great partner, to be sure, and Mendoza herself was no stranger to bending the rules here and there to convict a legitimate scumbag, but this entire department was corrupt to its bones. Even the good guys were on the take, if they knew what was good for them. The department had been riding high on the gravy train for years, but the city was waking up to this reality. Public relations for the NYPD in general were in the commode, and the MPD sat perched at the very top of that particular shit-list. Mendoza was now officially a ‘corrupt cop’, something she had fought hard against at every precinct she’d been shuffled around to. But it was the only way she could operate effectively without coming up against walls at every turn. The moment she accepted her first take, the world of policing suddenly opened up to her and she was nailing cases shut here, there and everywhere. But success did not equate to happiness, as she was quickly discovering. Corruption was something her cast-iron integrity had previously inoculated her against, and it kept her up at night that her strongest trait had failed her so quickly. 

But that was the problem with integrity: in this game, integrity got you precisely diddly-fucking-squat and a bullet in the back of the head. 

The city was dark lately, darker than usual, covered by dense clouds that seemed to hang in judgment of the huddled populace below them. The last wisps of sunlight had long since been scourged from the sky, the seeming-endless rain offering only minutes of respite before kicking in again. The current lull in the weather was about to break again; fat drops of liquid pollution hit the windshield in a slow build: one, two, ten, twenty… Within seconds the downpour began again, and an already drenched city began to slowly drown once more in emission-particulate-filled precipitation. Nowhere near as toxic as the fabled ‘acid rain’ of old, but you still wanted to avoid getting city-water in your mouth if you could help it. 

“Front page, that fucking prick.” Mendoza was terminally claustrophobic and her imagination ran wild as to how Jigsaw would test her if he got his hands on her. “Fuck.”

Samson slapped his phone shut, frustrated. “Yeah, we’ll deal with that motherfucker in time, but right now we gotta find Huggy. Asshole not pickin’ up.” 

Samson was talking about Huggy Burrr, a top-tier CI and all-round shitbag connected with the Massey Corps Slang Collective. Huggy was a Jigsaw survivor (“I was born in the motherfuckin’ trap, bitch!”). He lived by sacrificing his feet to a meat-grinder device, and was able to provide some strong insights to law enforcement into the logistics of the trap rooms. There were other survivors, but they were mostly recluse, some so traumatised as to be unfit to provide evidence or insight into anything. 

Jigsaw’s “rehabilitation” theory still had some serious kinks it needed to work out.

Mendoza put her hand on the door handle, but she just didn’t want… she just couldn’t do it. Sing and Kerry were both only days in the ground, and Tapp… Tapp, the solid-as-oak old-boy who had lived through countless hells in this job, was looking less likely to be able to return to active duty. Now Matthews was missing and Rigg from SWAT had lost his mind after Jigsaw decimated his squad. This serial monster was undermining the MPD, sowing debilitating fear amongst seasoned, highly capable and resilient cops, breaking them down to childlike base materials, playing them like goddamn puppets. The city’s grand experiment in law enforcement was unravelling in front of the whole world. Jigsaw was such a marketable personality that every nation on the globe was watching, waiting, taking bets on the next Jigsaw trap, knowing that the police were powerless to do anything about it except clean up after him.

She felt like a character actor imprisoned in a shitty telenovela, just waiting for her turn to be killed off. Just like a telenovela, the world audience didn’t mourn the deaths of these characters. They delighted in them. Jigsaw was the most fun a person could have these days, so long as you didn’t reside in New York City.

Samson sensed the tension from his partner, “Yo, Carm. You OK?”

Mendoza scowled at the rain outside the car. “Let’s just give it a minute.”


	3. Even the Guiltless Shall Suffer

The rain sounded like ball bearings hitting the roof of the shipping container. Anthony could hear it pounding in his dehydrated brain. This was a five-alarm hangover if he’d ever had one… but the thing was, he didn’t drink last night… not even one. 

This was wrong, something was wrong. 

He moved a hand to brush the hair from his eyes and felt the thick strap that bound his head down to the table. “Oh, holy Christ.” He peeled his dry eyelids back but still could see nothing but black haze. He blinked, over and over, desperate to stimulate a tear to lubricate the eyeball. His mouth was devoid of liquid and his tongue and cheeks were stuck to his gums and teeth.

And he was hot. 

So. Fucking. Hot. 

The strap was intricately wrapped around his head and under his chin. It felt old, the metal buckling was rusty and flaking, like one of those electric chair head-strap things he’d seen in old movies. It smelled aged, like well-worn leather with sharp notes of oxidization emanating from the metal. In this heat the rust smelled like blood. 

Anthony tried to lift his head but his body was strangely weakened and the strap held him in place. The panic rose immediately. He couldn’t see exactly where he was, but he knew he wasn’t in his home, in the last place he remembered being. His eyes were dry and blurry, in the blackness of the room he could make out long red glows above him. The odour was different here, the temperature was insane, and he was lying on a hard flat surface like a big table. He didn’t own a big table, certainly not one large enough for him to lie on without legs dangling over the edge. 

“Hello?” He had meant to call out, but what exited his throat was a scraping, hoarse whisper that felt like hot gravel. 

_What the shit is going on here??_

He tried to lift his head again, really feeling what was going on with his body this time. The strap was holding him down, but there was a bit of play. It was weighted, not tied. He lifted with a sudden burst of adrenaline and his head dragged the weight up with it, pulling a small locking pin free from its housing with and audible clink! Anthony couldn’t see what had just happened, but he could hear the click, click, click of a dull, steady metal-on-metal repetitive tap. Something was winding up? Or maybe down.

An old TV in the corner of the room fizzled to life, the nasty little puppet head appeared, turning to face the screen. And then, that voice: “Hello Justin, I want to play a game.”

Anthony shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “Justin? What the fu…” He frantically tugged at the strapping around his head but it was stuck fast. The TV illuminated the room somewhat, but Anthony’s eyes were not working properly. He could make out basic shapes and colours, but not much more.

The hideous puppet continued, “You have spent the majority of your adult existence as a pimp, selling flesh as a commodity like some kind of modern-day slave trader. You have treated people as objects yet with less care and attention than you provide your fleet of high-end vehicles. To you a human being equates nothing more than dollars in your pocket, but today you will learn the true value of human life. Today, you will learn the value of your own life.”

Anthony’s jaw dropped open, incredulous. “What is this, some Jigsaw shit? I’m not fucking Justin, you goddamn moron! My name is Anthony!” 

No cases of mistaken identity had occurred since Jigsaw’s campaign began: 100% of his victims were exactly who he thought they were. He was meticulous, more like a machine than a human being. That’s what made him so goddamn scary. Jigsaw didn’t make mistakes. 

This was a mistake.

The instruction part of the video began:

“You will notice the temperature in the room in which you are trapped is high. What you may not know is that it is steadily increasing, subtly for now, but with every point of a degree you get closer to roasting alive. You will have been lying in this room for roughly six hours so far, which means the cooking process has already begun. Your skin will ache, you will be thirsty beyond comprehension but will find no means to slake that thirst. Your vision will be affected, but again, you will find nothing to provide relief. With the current rate of temperature increase, in approximately 12 minutes your muscles will stop working properly. In 17 minutes the cooking process will have proceeded too far to be reversed and the probability of your survival becomes zero. By 22 minutes, you will more closely resemble a Thanksgiving brisket than a human being… and you will be dead.”

What Anthony couldn’t see was the bank of long industrial heating elements housed in the ceiling, but he could feel the emitted waves of baking heat. 

“You got the wrong guy!” Anthony fell on the walls, pounding with his fists, desperately searching for a way out. The heat kept increasing and with every movement Anthony could feel his skin crisping up and tightening around his flesh. It hurt, bad. He felt like he was crying, but there were no physical tears coming, just dry sobs, “You got the wrong guy!”

The puppet continued, oblivious to Anthony’s plight, “I know you just had your Bugatti interior customised with dolphin skin. I’ll bet you were looking forward to running your hands over it, caressing it, feeling the smooth finish... I’m here to tell you that that will never happen. At one end of this room, two metal plates are fixed to the wall. These plates are hot…very hot. They are also vital components to your survival. Placing your hands on both plates at the same time will close the circuit required to turn off the heat and release you from this room. But be aware: the charge is very weak and you will need to flatten your hands completely on each plate to generate enough of a charge to release you – fingertips alone will not do. This will take time, minutes even. Your hands will be destroyed and you will never feel the touch of your beloved vehicle interiors, or anything, ever again. But you will be alive. Make your choice.”

Anthony rushed to the end of the room, his vision was not improving so he didn’t see the plate in time to avoid leaning on it. Skisss! The skin on his forearm sizzled where it touched the plate and Anthony jumped back as though electrocuted, “FUCK!” He lightly tapped the plate again with a fingertip, again his skin sizzled. He couldn’t do this. No-one could do this. This wasn’t fair.

“HEY! HEY! SOMEONE PLEASE! HELP!”

Outside, the rain hammered down, generating an impenetrable cacophony that drowned out all other sound. The shipping container was situated in the middle of an old block of unused factories, miles away from town, or from anyone at all. Anthony’s screams didn’t even make it more than twenty feet past the container walls.

Parked around the corner, tucked away in one of the ruined warehouses, sat a blue Taurus with a single occupant. The dull light of a screen inside the car illuminated the Detective Hoffman’s face. He was keeping dry inside the vehicle, sucking down a double chocolate shake as he observed Anthony from a small mobile screen in his console. The windows of the container had metal plates welded over them, but a tiny hole was purpose-cut into one end of the structure to provide the housing for a camera lens.

Hoffman watched impassively as Anthony thrashed around the oven chamber, moving ever-closer to his own demise. He felt nothing as he watched a guiltless man pay for another man’s crimes. He wondered what was so wrong with him that he could feel nothing in this situation. There should have been a twinge of guilt, a hesitation, something. Something that proved he was a functional human being. But he couldn’t even muster a crocodile tear. He was more concerned by the fact that the shake was a little too thick to easily slide up the straw and he was getting a slight jaw-ache as a result. “Goddamn skinny straws.”

Hoffman should have felt something. He was the one who selected and kidnapped the undeserving Anthony. He was the one who put him in Justin’s place. He was the one who had consigned an innocent person to an horrific death... 

But all he could feel was relief; relief that his efforts were finally paying off and that Amanda would soon be excommunicated from the circle, relief that he could secure his rightful place at John’s side and influence the decision-making, relief that he would be recognised as the asset he was. 

Justin – the intended vic – was lying in Hoffman’s trunk, wrapped up tight in plastic sheeting, an exit wound in the back of his head the size of a fist. This had been Amanda’s gig. She developed the trap, sourced the location, identified the target. But Amanda was getting a bit big for her boots in Hoffman’s eyes. She had been hostile towards all of John’s devotees, initially believing she was his one and only and fervently wishing to be so. When she discovered others in the inner circle she initially withdrew and relapsed. She hated the others, who she blamed for manipulating John into sentencing her to a second trap. But above and beyond the rest, she hated Hoffman with a burning passion. He was MPD, the scourge of her existence. She didn’t trust a cop and couldn’t believe John would either – aren’t they the enemy? 

Despite her declining mental state, she was right not to trust Hoffman. He had been attempting to undermine all of the devotees since he became inculcated. Especially John’s golden child, Amanda. Hoffman did not play well with others and had a particular lack of respect for women. He would strip this bitch back to the base junkie he knew she truly still was inside, force John to admit his mistake in trusting her, and leverage his way into the top position.

Hoffman disengaged and entered the trap before Justin awoke from his drug-induced stupor, executed him and replaced him with the random ‘nobody’ he picked up that afternoon: Anthony Regis Tucker, a cashier at SportsPlus, a dog-lover and an avid hiker with no criminal record and no known extremist affiliations. He then rigged the trap to make it impossible to escape – an easy thing to happen when you let a junkie in the workshop…

A fuckup of this magnitude would surely see John let go of his Amanda obsession. 

Surely. 

“Sorry, pal. You didn’t do anything to deserve this… but that’s the whole point.”

The minutes dragged on. Anthony tried twice more to hold his hands on the plates, and twice failed. Hoffman looked away; not because he was squeamish, but because the man’s suffering was boring to him. The rain was a much nicer alternative, both calming and stimulating at once. Hoffman liked the rain. As kids, he and his sister used to hide under the bed when it would storm, pretending that aliens were landing, attacking earth and kidnapping children to work in ‘the mines’ – _kids’ imaginations… what are you gonna do?_

It was a nice memory, one he cherished dearly, and he relished this anomalous monsoon the city was experiencing. Lightning raced across the thick blanket of cloud above, and the rain became a storm, heralded by a long, low roll of thunder. Lost in the awesome magnitude of the weather, Hoffman pondered as to why evil and suffering needed to exist in a world so naturally beautiful. Why couldn’t everyone just sit down and relax and watch the rain…?

The movement in Hoffman’s periphery ceased. He turned back to the monitor. Anthony was lying still on the floor of the shipping container, his limbs slowly curling inward as they baked on their very bones. An innocent man was dead in a Jigsaw trap, and Amanda was going to have hell to pay for this fuckup.

Hoffman retrieved a burner from his glove compartment, contained within an evidence baggie, and dialled out. “Yes, hello. I’d like to report a crime…”


	4. Strange Bedfellows

The Massey Corps Slang Collective had started out with best intentions. It was a group of concerned citizens who patrolled the hoods, keeping an eye on police activity, recording, tracking and reporting corruption and brutality. The system developed over time and soon all the local gangsters jumped on board because it was the best way to stay two steps ahead of the police. Within a year the Corps devolved into a well organised gang of pushers and pimps, headed by the charismatic and brutal Abraham Porter, AKA High Top. 

Mendoza and Samson stood outside the heavy steel door of the Corps’ headquarters. Samson pounded with a hammer fist, “NYPD, open up!”

A small, recessed slot slid open, suspicious eyes peering through. “Where’s your warrant?”

Samson held his badge up to the slot, “I don’t need a warrant if I have reason to suspect criminal activity. Come on and open up, Jerome. We just need to talk to Hug.”

The eyes in the slot narrowed, annoyed, “It’s Big Jump, bitch.”

Samson shook his head and he and Mendoza shared a little chuckle. “Yeah, tell that to your mom.”

Big Jump swore to himself behind the steel door, “You _know_ my motherfuckin’ name. You’re just choosing to piss me off.” The slot closed and steel dragged on steel as heavy bolts were removed and the thick barrier swung open to a black maw. “Come in, motherfucker.”

Samson and Mendoza headed inside.

The hallway was dark. Jerome slammed the door shut behind them and replaced the heavy bolts. “You know the way.” He dismissed the detectives by returning to his stool. 

Mendoza had never been inside the Corps building before. It was notably clean and neat, which shouldn’t have been a surprise to her. This was no crack house; it was the central business hub for one of the largest-netting, no-tax-paying organisations in the city. The scent of vanilla and weed and expensive cigars hung in the air, but without overpowering the senses. 

Two large men in plain black suits and sunglasses exited the room at the end of the hall and flanked the doorway, waiting for the detectives. Samson reassured his partner, “This is just how they do. Be cool and it’ll be cool.” Mendoza gave a tiny nod. She wasn’t easily intimidated, and she trusted Samson’s lead in this part of town. 

The large man to the left raised a hand as they approached. “Leave the straps.” Samson immediately drew and handed over his sidearm, giving the Mendoza the nod to follow suit. She pulled her sidearm and her backup, handing them over. 

The large men seemed satisfied and opened the door. 

The office on the other side of the door felt like an entirely different location. It was bright and open, tastefully decorated with a floral touch and lined with floor to ceiling plate glass with a view to a bountiful courtyard garden, branches and blossoms dancing in the rain outside. A handful of beautiful people sat in luxurious splendor, drinking from fine crystal and snorting sweet pure MDMA and ketamine through rolled up hundreds.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the friendly neighbourhood five-oh. Been a while since I had the pleasure.” Abraham ‘High Top’ Porter, resplendent, glided over to the business side of the ornate mahogany desk in the centre of the room. His suit was tailored by a master, muted cyan/aqua, with a complementary magenta shirt, diamond cuffs to match the diamonds in his teeth. He coastered his drink and dropped a big fat burning joint into a vintage Steuben ashtray before sitting in the big chair. He gestured for the detectives to do the same, “Please, have a seat.”

This room’s furnishings alone were worth more than both the detectives’ houses combined, and then some. 

“I know you’re a busy man, Mr Porter. I don’t wanna to take up any more of your time than I have to…”

“Stop.” High Top raised an elegant finger, emphasizing his demand. Samson swallowed the end of his sentence and leaned back in his chair – feeling true seated comfort for the first time in a long time. _I’m in the wrong game…_

“Huggy aint here. No-one knows where he is, although we do have some theories.”

Samson was ready for it, “Hit me.”

“As you know, he became something of a folk hero round here on account of him escaping from the Jigsaw killer. Head got all big, and he’s lounging in his new-found celebrity. He started spending more time big-noting himself to get his dick sucked than he did taking care of my bottom line. So, I had to let him go.”

Samson and Mendoza shared a quick look. Samson turned back to High Top, “I know you didn’t just confess to a murder, Mr Porter.”

The stylish man behind the desk grinned wide, the full extent of his grills gleamed out from his smile, blinding the detectives with his affluence. His grin became a laugh.

“Shit, Detective. We don’t do like that, go around capping our friends and partners.” He adjusted his jacket and tie, sat up a little straighter, “We aint cops.” 

This got Mendoza’s blood up. She fumed, shifted in her chair and clenched her fists. Samson gave a gossamer-light touch to her arm to calm her, to let her know it’s cool, 

and to just… 

…be… 

…cool.

High Top was taking in the dynamic between the two detectives as each moment unfolded. He was astute, as perceptive as a ninja, and was tailoring his speech purposely to test them. 

“Huggy’s a cousin, he’s a brother. He’s just also a useless, showboatin’ pain in my ass so I canned his clearance and told him to take a knee until I could place him again. Tried calling his ass for a drink – _because he’s my friend_ – two days ago and still haven’t heard shit. I gotta say, I may be getting a little worried at this point.”

Samson was sceptical, an eyebrow raised, “You don’t seem like the type to get shook that easy.” 

Samson leaned forward, serious, “Last time he radio-silenced my ass he was stuck up in a fuckin’ white serial killer’s lair, getting his feet chewed off by a lawnmower or some shit. So, yeah, I’m concerned about a nigga.”

“It was more like a wood chipper.” Mendoza pushed back in her own way. Abraham deliberately turned his head to focus on her. He glared at her, long and cold. 

“My mistake, Miss, ah...”

“ _Detective_ Mendoza.”

“Well OK then. It was lovely to meet you, sweetie, but the men are talking now.”

Samson stepped in again, ever the calming voice of reason. “How does he get around these days?”

High Top lifted the burning joint to his lips and took a big toke, and then stacked on a second one. He held the smoke in, maintaining eye contact with Mendoza. He exhaled directly at her, plumes of smoke jettisoning from his lungs into her face. She didn’t bat an eyelid or move at all, just inhaled deeply through her nose.

“Damn. Your done got yourself a partner upgrade there, Sam. This one got juice!”

Samson couldn’t help but agree. Mendoza may have been a surly prick, but she was tough as nails and just as sharp. Curtis, his old partner, had too much compassion. It blinded him to the shitty realities of the city, and eventually killed him when he afforded trust to a piece of shit junkie. Three rounds in his back, goodnight Mr Nice-Guy.

“And Huggy?”

“I got my man in a very fuckin’ expensive top-of-the-line wheelchair. He’s measured up for his prosthetics, but it’s gonna take around six months before they ready. Besides that, he can use crutches, but you know Hug… Never did get too excited about exercise.”

This was a dead-end. Samson believed High Top that he hadn’t heard from Huggy. And if he was to be believed about Huggy big-noting himself in public, then perhaps… maybe, just maybe Jigsaw grabbed him again, just like he had Amanda Young, and put him into a second trap. The point of surviving the traps was to rehabilitate a shitty person into a functional one. If Hug hadn’t ‘learned his lesson’, then Jigsaw’s theory would be proven invalid to the world. If Samson knew anything about this particular psycho, it was that he genuinely believed his traps to be infallible. Huggy’s public showboating would be a liability to Jigsaw’s image. 

The thought of surviving one Jigsaw trap was enough to send a chill down Samson’s spine. Having to go through it a second time was incomprehensible to him. _This fuckin’ guy… Fuckin’ Jigsaw… He’s got us. Got us all by the fuckin’ balls of our deepest fears._

__

“OK. Thank you for your time, Mr Porter. Always a pleasure.” Samson rose, Mendoza followed his lead.

__

High Top wasn’t quite finished yet, “Yo. I gotta tell you, we brought in some consultants from out of state. All legal, above board. This piece of bullshit done fucked up when he touched the Corps. Now he got the police, los federales, and us, all seeking to unearth his sneaky ass and string it up. Not for nothing, but I heard Vito Martinelli didn’t take too kindly to having his nephew melted alive in acid, neither. Your boy’s made a lot of high rollin’ enemies.”

__

“What’s your point?”

__

“My point, detective, is that if he’s as smart as we all know he is, and if we don’t catch him soon, like _now_ , we may never find his ass. And wouldn’t that be a sonofabitch?”

__

Samson’s phone began to ring – it was the office.

__


	5. The Wrong Guy

Samson and Mendoza sat in their car, watching as SWAT cut through the welded plating on the shipping container. They didn’t recognise any of these guys; they were on loan out of Jersey. City SWAT was tied up and the MPD was still reeling after losing 80% of their unit to Jigsaw and having their Sergeant placed on administrative leave. Everything was going to hell in a handbasket, and the NYPD was sitting in the front seat of this ride.

A person-sized hole was finally cut through and the officers recoiled from the blast of heat that escaped. 

CSI swarmed.

Anthony’s body was dragged out, blackened and curled like a pile of burnt onion rings. The camera mounted to the exterior of the container was carefully removed, as was all other pertinent evidence once the elements were switched off. 

Mendoza didn’t notice that she was clenching her jaw until the cramp set in. “Damn it.” She pulled the gum out and began to chew. For her, simply being locked in such a small space would be torture enough. Being cooked alive on top of that was beyond her ability to soundly comprehend. 

Samson hadn’t been able to crack a smile from his new partner since she joined up. That was 46 days of partnership and not a single smile, not even at first meeting. He wondered to himself why that mattered. He’d never considered it before, but her constant depressed state was starting to affect him, and grated on his nerves. But it couldn’t just be that. He wasn’t that petty. It was this fucking weather, and Jigsaw and the newspaper bullshit, and home life was spiralling… It was just everything, but his mind was transposing it onto Mendoza. _What did she have to be so fucking upset about, anyway?_

As if sensing his question, Mendoza opened up. “When I was little, my dad used to…” She stopped short, swallowing hard, looking for the right words.

“He would put us in this tiny little fruit cellar as punishment if we stepped out of line. There’s a lot to the story and I won’t get into it, but I still have nightmares about that fucking cellar. It… It shuts me down completely. I can handle fuckin’ anything, except that.”

Samson felt a little pang of guilt for being so judgemental without knowing her story. 

“My dad was a bad guy. He did bad things to us and we were so small, so fuckin’ helpless. Not all of us made it. That’s why I became a cop. To put men like him away, to save those little kids that they hurt. But now, at the MPD, I dunno. The work doesn’t feel meaningful anymore. It just feels… punishing.”

“I hear you. But to be perfectly honest this sounds like burnout, Mendoza.” 

She nodded to herself, “Maybe. Maybe.”

“You’re a grown-ass woman, and one heck of a tough cop. You’re not some helpless little kid anymore.”

Mendoza turned and faced Samson directly, her eyes wet as tears began to well, her lip quivering. She was terrified. “We’re all helpless if Jigsaw chooses us. And I know it… I just fuckin’ know it, he’s gonna put me right back in that cellar and I won’t be able to deal, Sam. I won’t.”

Samson had had enough. It was time to put this shit to rest. “I’m gonna come straight out and say it: just fuckin’ quit. Sign off, hand it in and go and find something you can do without all this… I’m not trying to be an asshole here, I’m not. This job is grinding you into the ground, girl. It aint healthy.”

Mendoza knew she had pushed her partner’s patience too far. She wanted to make it right; she respected and liked Samson. But the images of Jigsaw’s victims – the survivors as well as those not so lucky – stacked up in her mind until it overflowed with unfathomable horrors and twisted her sense of reality. In a single year Jigsaw had dished out a career’s-worth of twisted, burned, broken, sliced, torn, and crushed human bodies and body-parts. Cops were lining up to get into counselling, others were simply leaving the force altogether.

“Hey, Sam?”

Samson inhaled deeply, preparing for the next depressing shit to spill from his partner, “Yeah, Carm?”

“Thank you. I needed to hear that. I did.”

Samson turned to face Mendoza again, his eyes softer, empathetic. “For what it’s worth, I hope you don’t leave. You’re a bad motherfucker and I feel a helluva lot safer with you around, but you gotta look out for you. I’ll support your decision either way, OK?”

A uniform stepped up and knocked on the driver’s side window. Samson wound it down a crack to avoid letting the rain in, “Yes, officer?”

“CSI is asking for you. There’s a discrepancy or something.”

Samson nodded and wound the window back up. “Back on the clock.” He jabbed a finger light-heartedly at Mendoza, “To be continued.”

***

Pop-out pagodas – essentially spring-loaded tents with clear, roll-down flaps as walls – were deployed to protect from the rain. Samson and Mendoza stood over the gurney that held Anthony’s burned body. Steam rose from the still-hot crispy flesh, reacting with the chill wind brought in by the storm. CSI Detective First Grade Jennings Foster met them in the pagoda, removing his gloves and wiping the rain from his face.

“Detectives.”

Samson studied the burned corpse before him. “Hey Fost. One of the uniforms said you found something. A discrepancy?”

Foster handed over a small digital recorder. “The message was on VHS again. They’d insulated the TV and the player against the heat, but not very well. The tape was badly damaged by the time we got to it but we managed to get most of the audio to digital.”

Samson hit play, Jigsaw’s message to Justin played. “So, what’s the issue?”

“The issue is we found a wallet in the vicinity, next to pattern drag marks. We think it may have fallen out of the vic’s pocket as he was dragged into the container.”

Mendoza piped up, “That’s good news, no? Quick ID?”

Foster grimaced slightly and shook his head. “Maybe not. The ID in the wallet belongs to one Anthony Regis Tucker, registered as a missing person by his girlfriend last night. This trap was for someone called Justin. Nothing on the tape describes the person lying on this gurney.”

“They got the wrong guy?”

“Early analysis would indicate that, yeah, they got the wrong guy.” 

“That’s never happened before.”

“No, it has not.”

Samson rubbed his face, disconcerted all over again. He noted a couple of CSI sniffing around the ruined warehouses that flanked the crime scene. “What’s going on over there?”

Foster squinted past the industrial lighting. “Oh, there’s a set of tracks leading in and out of the complex that terminate in that warehouse. Standard 14s, by the looks, but we’ll know more once get the labs back.”

A sudden gust of wind blew one of the wall flaps in, drenching everyone and everything in a layer of rain. Foster barked out to his subordinates, “Secure those goddamn walls! This is a clean zone, for Christ’s sake!”

Mendoza was transfixed by the burned corpse before her. The ways in which a human body could be destroyed was as fascinating as it was horrific, “Who called this in?”

Foster chuckled ironically. “Anonymous, on a burner. Location ping situates it here. The caller was here, but the weird thing is how would they know there was any crime taking place? The container has no windows and is pretty well insulated for heat and noise. The storm was full pelt at that time. I mean, what the hell would anyone even be doing out here?”

Samson pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes. There’s only one reason someone would be out here at exactly the right time under such strange circumstances: “They were waiting. Observing their handiwork and waiting for the right time to call it in. But why?”

Foster nodded. “That’s the sixty-four million dollar question right now. Once we deconstruct this trap we’ll have a much better idea of the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’. Leave it with us. We’ll shoot you any intel we generate as soon as we have it. We need to shut this guy down. He’s got the whole city in a goddamn panic. Never seen anything like it.”

Samson patted Foster on the shoulder, “We’re working on it, Fost. Keep us on speed-dial.”

Foster shook the detectives’ hands warmly. “I will. You stay safe.”

“You too.”

Mendoza rubbed her chin thoughtfully. Samson stared at her, as though waiting for a revelation.

She settled on a thought, “Trouble in paradise, maybe? We know he works with others. Maybe some kind of power play?”

Samson nodded. It was a solid theory. “Sure, sure. Could be there’s a fracture in his lieutenant structure. Someone vying for the top spot?”

Mendoza felt suddenly energized; using her brain, developing leads… this is what it was all about. “Let’s get back to the board and run some probabilities on known associates.”

A uniform entered the pagoda, dripping wet, looking grim. “Uh, detectives, you wanted word on that Massey CI… Huggy Bear?”

Samson animated, “Close enough. Yeah, what you got?”

“We’ve got a body.”


	6. The Ties That Bind

Huggy dragged his eyelids up in what felt like a gargantuan effort. The knockout drugs were still floating around his system and he was as groggy as a newborn calf.

“The fuck…?” Last thing he remembered was a party, but the details were fuzzy. Party was at… was with… _Shit, I don’t even remember._

Huggy was used to waking up feeling like hot trash, but this was different. He was a seasoned and decorated soldier and party animal, and he boasted a legendary tolerance to everything: drugs, alcohol, knife and gunshot wounds, baseball bats, loss, despair... You name it, he could take it. But the last time he felt this fucking awful was when he did the roofie challenge: he swallowed enough Rohypnol to kill a horse, just to see what would happen. That turned out to be a mistake, and he paid for it dearly for days afterwards. 

This felt like that. 

“S-swore… I would never… never do that shit… again…” He tried to rub the sleep out of his eyes, but the blurriness persisted. 

As his vision returned he realized he was not in his home. Or anywhere that he recognized. 

_Goddamn. Second location. You fucked up, Hug_

You never leave a party alone to go to a second location with a stranger. That’s law. 

The next realization was that he was not in his chair. His stumps ached like he’d been dancing on them or something. “Where the fuck are those crutches?” He swung his heavy head around, scanning his surroundings. It looked like a crack house: broken furniture and rotting mattresses strewn on the floor, shit and crappy tags painted what was left of the walls, which had been smashed open to reveal the precious copper line behind the drywall. 

He patted himself down; his strap was gone. He never went anywhere without that custom P320. His wallet was missing too, as was the knot he kept down his pants. 

_Goddammit, Hug. This some rookie ass bullshit._

“Hey!” The acoustics of the room were dead flat, and Huggy winced as his cry reverberated painfully in his eardrums. He’d been in enough recording studios to know what a sound-insulated room felt like. 

Taking stock of his situation, he was unarmed, no wallet, no cash, no wheelchair or crutches, alone in a soundproofed room. A twinge of panic danced around the edge of his consciousness.

_So, this is how a muthafucker goes out…_

He grasped the arms of the chair he was sitting in and slowly, painfully, stood up. The wire attached to the back of his belt pulled taught, and there was an audible clink! of something metallic being pulled free from a housing. Huggy had been here before, and he knew exactly what the sound meant, “Oh, shit.”

A small TV, wrapped up in a pile of trash in one corner sparked to life with a blast of static. The screen illuminated the room further, casting shadows in parts and highlighting the filth in others. In another corner of the room, hidden under another pile of garbage, a digital clockface switched on, the red numbers counting down in one-second increments from seven minutes.

"Fuck you, you pussy-ass puppet muthafucker." 

“Hello Huggy, long time no see.”

Huggy flopped back down in the chair and sucked a tooth aggressively, “Suck my dick.”

“I have to say, I am very disappointed in your progress. You survived a terrible ordeal, but learned nothing in the process. You slid immediately back to your old crew, back to your old ways, and used the lesson I provided you as an opportunity to increase your own celebrity. This was not my intent. Your resilience to personal growth was a more powerful adversary than I had accounted for. I will not make that mistake twice.”

“Good for you.” Huggy didn’t feel fear in any kind of conventional way. His fear reaction manifested as sassy sarcasm. Growing up as he did, where he did, the fear of death was stripped out of him from a very young age. This was something Jigsaw had not accounted for. Growing up in a white, middle-class world, John Kramer had never lived through that type of experience and he severely underestimated Huggy. As a result, his first trap did not have the desired effect. 

“The air in the room in which you find yourself is slowly being saturated with a corrosive agent. It is already going to work on your skin and your lungs, and you have less than ten minutes before the process becomes irreversible. You will literally melt, both inside and out, and all that will be left will be a skeleton lying in a puddle of liquified flesh and organs. There are two means of escape, however. Please, pull the curtain on the wall behind your chair…”

Huggy didn’t move, “Fuck you. You pull it.” 

The puppet waited for a couple of seconds, clearly expecting Huggy to pull the stained and holy curtain off the wall. 

“Last time I asked you to sacrifice part of your body that whole may survive. This sacrifice stands, and I will not demand any more blood from you. This time, someone else will make the sacrifice for you.”

This piqued Huggy’s interest. “The fuck…?”

He slowly pulled himself out of the chair, using the arm and back to balance on his throbbing foot-stumps. He reached out and yanked the curtain down from the wall. His jaw dropped open and he staggered back, catching himself on the corner of the chair before crashing to the ground in a heap, agape, staring up in horror at the scene before him.

“M… momma?”

Fastened into a steel frame, fixed into a recess in the wall, was Marceline Martin, Huggy’s mother. She was completely immobile and gagged, and appeared to be unconscious. The framework was meshed together tightly with no hope of anyone slipping through it, except in the section around Marceline’s stomach. A man Huggy’s size could just squeeze through, if only Marceline’s body wasn’t in the way…

There was another person, in exactly the same circumstances as Marceline, recessed right next to her. It was Tierra-Alexus. Huggy’s daughter. Both Marceline and Tierra-Alexus started to come around as Huggy observed. They quickly figured out they were restrained and wriggled and squirmed in vain against their cages, screaming into their ball-gags and pleading to God with wild eyes.

“Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no… Not my family, uh-uh!” Huggy tried to reach through the securing framework to undo the gags, but the gaps in the metal were too small and his big hands were never going to get through. 

The puppet’s instruction continued, “Now you know the stakes, here are your instructions: take up the axe lying on the floor next to me here…” There was, indeed, a brand-new red fire-axe leaning on the TV. “…and hack your way through one of the people blocking your exit. I expect you will try to use the axe to chop through the walls or floor. I hope, in this fruitless endeavour, you don’t wear yourself out for you see, the entire room is encased in concrete and steel. Your only exit is through either your mother or your daughter. Once on the other side you will be able to release the surviving family member and two of you will walk free.”

Marceline and Tierra-Alexus both renewed their struggles and screams as the puppet explained their fate. 

“Who will you sacrifice to save your own life? Your mother, who subjected you to incredible abuse throughout your entire childhood and continues to abuse children to this day? Or your daughter, the terminal addict paid in crack-cocaine to groom the underage girls her grandmother pimps out?”

Huggy coughed into his hand, there was blood. “It’s a family business! The fuck you want from me?!”

“The room becomes more toxic and corrosive by the second. You do not have long. Make your choice.” The TV switched itself off and the room darkened once more. 

The countdown clock was down to five minutes. Huggy’s lip quivered, but he didn’t break. He had taken lives before. Cappin’ some fool came easy to him. Shit, he’d even shot women dead without blinking. He was stone cold, certified, gully-as-fuck gangsta.

But this was some other shit.

This was his moms. This was his baby girl. Blood was sacred in the ‘hood, sacred in the Corps. He wasn’t going to be able to brag about surviving this shit. Not this time.

Huggy had fantasized about killing his mother over and over as a kid. The abuses she subjected him to were… They were enough to tip a bright, creative young boy over into the pit of shit that became his life. He dreamed about tying her down and setting her on fire. He imagined the feeling of clubbing her to death with his Lil Slugger. He’d even aimed a loaded handgun at her while she slept, on more than one occasion, daring himself to pull the trigger. 

Now he was faced with the reality of killing her, that shit didn’t hold the same appeal. 

His hood-rat daughter had robbed him more times than he could count and had fucked every one of his friends and associates for a hit. She was his constant shame, and it was work to repair the damage she continually wreaked upon his reputation. Huggy used to let himself off the hook about Tierra-Alexus. Shit, he was only 12 years old when he got that crackhead, D’Nae, pregnant. A kid and a crackhead… what the fuck did anyone expect? 

Tierra-Alexus had been born with a dependency and, as time passed, Huggy began to quietly acknowledge his part in the path his daughter had taken. He recognized that with the money he made, he could have provided for her better. He just chose not to. 

The scratch in his throat started to irritate too intensely to be ignored. He resigned himself to his mission. 

“Motherfucker.” There was no passion or energy in his exclamation. Only defeat.

He hobbled over to the axe and snatched it up, hefting it. The bound women began to scream all the louder and thrashed in their restraints, neither knowing who he had chosen to die so horribly.

Huggy swung into the nearest wall. The axe bit through the drywall but bounced back like a rubber ball, having struck a steel plate and the other side. He turned and tried again on the opposite wall with the same result. “Wasn’t lying.”

He paused, not wanting to turn around, to face his family, knowing he was about to butcher one of them to save the other. He knew in his heart which family member had to go. He knew the one who deserved it the most. He knew the one who done the most harm and had the least chance of redemption. 

He hardened his heart, gritted his teeth, and spun around.

“OK, Momma. It’s your time. Make your peace with the motherfuckin’ Almighty.”

Marceline’s eyes bulged in panic as watched her son bear down on her. The axe swung in a wide arc, biting deep into her sternum, shattering through the bone cage surrounding her heart. She screamed so hard her throat stretched beyond it's critical elasticity and tore a little. Blood spurted from around the ball gag in her mouth, but it was not from her torn vocal cords. The axe had smashed arteries and Marceline's throat quickly filled with blood. She coughed and choked on it, spitting it out where she could, but the ball gag was too obstructive. The choking became suffocation. She began to swallow the blood, gulping it down it large swallows just so she could make room for oxygen to get past. All of these panicked actions were, of course, in vain. She was dead already, her body just hadn't caught up to that fact yet.

Huggy yanked the axe free, releasing a torrent of blood from his mother’s chest. He swung again, a downward stroke this time, slashing and tearing through her floating ribs and stomach. Marceline sank into shock and her body became wracked in seizure. Huggy swung again and again, splattering the room and himself with his mother’s precious blood. Chunks of her flesh and bone and internals plopped down into a small, wet pile at her feet. 

Huggy had removed a large section of her torso and internal organs, and now needed to crack through the spine and connecting ribs in Marceline’s back. The flesh and bone was quite flexible and because it was deeper into the framework he was having trouble landing a solid blow. “Wrong tool for the job, asshole.” He stopped for a moment, sweating and puffing. There was blood mixing in his sweat. He glanced at the timer: still had 3 minutes left. 

He looked up at Tierra-Alexus, up at his terrified and traumatized daughter. Her skin was gaunt and ridden with sores, she was deathly underweight, covered in shitty backyard tattoos… but here and now, in this place, in this shit, all Huggy could see was his beautiful baby girl and all he could feel was a father’s responsibility to protect his child. 

He smashed through the back of his expired mother and leaped through the cavity he had created in her body. He landed on cold concrete, quaking in rage and terror and horror. He screamed out at the world with tones of anguish a depth of emotion he never knew existed within him.

Once outside the toxic room it was a simple task to release Tierra-Alexus from her steel prison by pulling a single lever, sliding the locking bolts from their housings and opening the back of the cage. The family – what was left of it – staggered to the marked exit and into the next chapter of their lives.


	7. Fractures

Gideon Meatpacking Plant. The sign was illuminated for a second as a fork of lightning burst across the sky. Hoffman pulled up around the back of the massive production factory, ducking his head under his jacket as he raced the rain inside the small back door exit. The rain had renewed its strength and although out in it only for a second, Hoffman was thoroughly dampened.

He never understood the connection between a meat-packing facility, and John’s dead baby boy. He’d named the building before he named the child and that’s what messed with Hoffman. _Why the fuck would he name his firstborn after a fucking building that hacks up animals into pieces?_

Hoffman strode up the dark corridor towards the crack of light shining through the heavy door, slightly ajar, ahead of him. Voices were heightened, Amanda was arguing with John again. The detective slowed his pace and stopped before entering. 

“…you saw what he did, John! He reset the entire trap! And put an innocent person in there… an _innocent_ man with a family and-“

“How is that any different to your behaviour towards Detective Kerry?”

“She wasn’t innocent! Fucking bitch was trying to shut us down! To destroy everything we’ve been working towards!” There was unexpected venom in Amanda’s voice. Hoffman was taken aback that little goody two-shoes would talk back to her Messiah in such a manner.

“STOP.”

That voice. Even without the audio alteration, John’s voice carried a weight of gravitas and authority. Hoffman wasn’t even in the room and he could feel it, palpable, like a sudden change in temperature or a powerful gust of wind. John was a force of nature.

“Do you remember your friend, Cecil?”

Hoffman heard Amanda sob in sudden shock, Cecil’s name hitting her like blow to the face.

“John, I-”

“Do you remember me telling you about that night, about the night this all began?”

“…”

“Answer me.”

“Yes, John.”

“Do you remember your own state of mind at that time? Do you remember why Cecil was at the clinic in the first place?”

Amanda broke and began to cry. Hoffman felt a tiny smile creep in to his semi-permanent scowl. Her pain brought him pleasure. _Fucking junkie bitch._

John’s voice continued, filling the empty space with his vocal energy, “The tragedy from which I was reborn was orchestrated by your hand. You are, and have always been, my saviour.”

Hoffman’s scowl returned with a vengeance. _Why the fuck does he praise her like this? It’s her fucking fault his kid died!_

“Mark is a broken man. Perhaps I have been a little over-enthusiastic in his progress, but please understand that none of this can occur without him,” Hoffman smiled again, involuntarily, as a result of his narcissism. Eavesdropping on this conversation was an emotional roller-coaster!

“None of this can occur without you, and none of this can occur without our other associates. We are a family now, and families take care of each other. Families forgive each other. Mark has done a terrible thing, but is it any less terrible than your own transgressions? Than mine?”

This felt like the right moment to enter the room. Hoffman strode in to the workshop. John was lying in his hospital bed in the middle of the floor. His physical being was deteriorating but his mind remained sharp and he was determined to keep an eye and a hand in all the planning and engineering decisions. After all, while his students were showing great promise, none of them held a degree or anything like his level of practical experience. There had been near-misses in the workshop and he wanted to keep them as just that: misses.

Both Amanda and John looked up as Hoffman entered. Amanda wiped her nose and steeled her face – she didn’t ever want to show weakness in front of Hoffman. John’s pale face cracked a small smile. “Ah, Mark. Speak of the devil.”

“And he shall appear. How are you feeling, John?” 

“As well as can be expected, under the circumstances. Please, take a seat. I need to speak with both of you.”

Amanda stayed by John’s side, holding his hand comfortingly while keeping a watchful eye on Hoffman.

Mark played it cool as ever, pulling up a steel foldout chair. 

“We have a new adversary. A pair of New York’s finest…” He clicked a button on a remote in his hand. One of the several televisions in the workshop switched on, revealing photographs of Detectives Mendoza and Samson. Hoffman recognised them immediately.

“Samson and Mendoza. MPD. I know them. Well, I know him. She’s new.”

John continued, “They’re getting close, Mark. We need to pump their brakes.” John coughed once, twice, wincing in pain each time. Amanda moved closer, Hoffman remained unmoved.

“I’ll lift their personnel files tomorrow on-shift. We can start planning immediately.”

John nodded weakly, “Good. Thank you.” 

Hoffman tried to smile at John, but, like all of his attempts at smiling since his sister’s death, it came across as more of an aggressive sneer. He returned his face back to the comfortable resting position of ‘steely gaze’, “Oh, and our friend from Massey?”

“Huggy, yes.”

“He beat his second run. Chose the mother, as you predicted. He became catatonic soon after we picked him up, so he’ll be spending some time at St Angela Merici to recover. Tough guy like that should bounce back. Maybe.”

“His recovery is in his own hands now.”

John lay back into his pillows and closed his eyes. Hoffman’s gaze lingered on the diminishing man in the bed before him, astounded by the way he still managed to command authority and respect from this weakened position. He felt no empathy, but he respected John’s power. He placed a hand on John’s arm, giving it a gentle squeeze, “I’ll be back tomorrow with those files.”

He shot a nasty look in Amanda’s direction. “Keep him comfortable, you hear me?”

Amanda fired knives back at him, but did not reply.

Hoffman strode out of the workshop, grinning to himself as he always did when John preferenced him in front of Amanda. _I’ll be in charge any day now…_

***

Samson and Mendoza picked Huggy up at his home. After Marceline’s body was found it was a simple task to follow the shellshocked Huggy back to his safe space.

With trap analysis and interviews conducted with Huggy and Tierra-Alexus, it became clear that charges needed to be laid, but what those charges would be and on whom were in contention. Huggy simply stopped responding to any stimuli during the interview, just sat still in his seat, lost in a thousand-yard stare.

He had butchered his mother, by his own admission and the testimony of his daughter. But if he had taken no action all three would be dead. On the other hand, Marceline may have been a despicable piece of shit, but she was still a human being and an American citizen. The DA was left scratching her head. Can a person stuck in a Jigsaw trap be held fully responsible for their actions? There was precedent by now to show that the traps more often than not induced a severe mental breakdown, and it could easily be argued that the victims were not in control of their mental faculties while in the trap. But precedent wasn’t law. No matter which direction they turned, the lawyers came up shrugging. Jigsaw was digging his hooks into the very foundations of their society, exposing the flaws and weaknesses, with nothing more than a simple engineering degree and the will of a titan.

Charging Huggy with his mother’s murder just seemed unnecessary and cruel, and the opposite of justice. The DA pressed pause on the Huggy issue; he was charged with manslaughter but was held in remand at a psychiatric unit. Hacking a hole in his own mother’s living body, then crawling through it, broke him. His sheet was put in a special ‘limbo’ section of the DA’s filing system until such a time as the case against him could be clearly defined, or could not and thus would be discarded. 

His catatonia had ceased and while he was able to communicate with the medical staff he remained withdrawn and distant. The doctor in charge notified the MPD that Huggy was speaking again, but due to his pharmaceutical regime his testimony would not be admissible in court or as evidence.

Samson scowled at his luck. He needed Huggy. Huggy had information but now he was stuck in a pharmaceutically-induced stupor… Samson wouldn’t be able to trust anything he said, or even expect it to be forthcoming at all, depending on how drugged up they had him. A former multiple-felon with a history of remorseless violent crime? They were definitely drugging that guy up to the gills. 

Mendoza hadn’t asked Samson why Huggy was so important. She was ride or die, and the ‘who and what’ mattered less than the ‘where and when’, but her professional inner-self recognised that she probably should understand the full scope of her actions. “What is it with him, anyway?”

Samson rubbed his face, trying to refresh his tired brain. “The dude was close with Amanda Young. He dealt to her and that Cecil piece of shit for, like, two-and-a-bit years. That long a relationship… you pick things up about the other person. Young is still our closest connection to Jigsaw, so if we nail her, who knows.”

“That sounds like the beginning of a lead.” Mendoza was down. It energized her to smell a wisp of a lead. Anything to distract her from her own thoughts. 

Anything to keep her mind out of that cellar.

“Sure, but with our friend currently indisposed it’s just fuckin’ wishful thinking.”

Mendoza wasn’t going to let this go, “I know those places pretty well. Got a few mental fuckups _en mi familia_ , spent a lot of there. You gotta get there first thing, 6am. They wake ‘em up, let ‘em shower, prepare for the day, then they dose them at breakfast. We get there early enough he might still be _compos mentis_.”

Samson processed his partner’s advice. The logic was solid. “Damn, Mendoza. Ok, ok, ok… That might work.”

“Tomorrow?”

Samson let a hint of a smile break through the corners of his mouth. “Tomorrow.”


	8. The Noose Tightens

Saint Angela Merici Psychiatric Hospital: an imposing grey stone multi-storey edifice, planted atop a hill with nothing behind it but sky. The hospital was originally built as a prison more than 200 years prior and, needing only minor maintenance, this solid old structure would stand for hundreds of years to come, guarding the secrets of the hells contained within its walls.

The morning light was dampened by the thick clouds generating a sense of late afternoon. Without a working clock it would be impossible to estimate the time here now. The rain had eased back to a drizzle, but soft distant thunder suggested that more was to come.

Samson had a spring in his step this morning. Mendoza had replaced her trademark scowl for something a little softer, a little less imposing. This could be the start of something (Jigsaw’s end?), they both felt it. It only took a single domino to knock over the entire row. Huggy, then Amanda, then Kramer. Three steps. Big steps, admittedly, but only three. 

Samson had knocked over cases with many more degrees of separation than this. Things were looking up.

A doctor approached, sombre and withdrawn, her hands clutched together in consternation. Samson immediately got a vibe… not a good one. He and Mendoza flashed their badges, asked about Huggy.

“Oh… Mr Martin, yes. I’m sorry, detective-?”

“Samson.”

“I’m very sorry detective Samson, but Mr Martin was found dead in his room just this morning; literally minutes ago. I… I found him. I’m Margot, by the way. Dr Nolan. You’ll have to excuse me, I’m still a little shaken.”

Samson was in no mood for being patient with people, “Cause of death?”

Dr Nolan pursed her lips and slowly shook her head, “Asphyxiation, by the looks. Self-inflicted.”

_Fucking killed himself. Jesus, what the fuck… ?_

“We immediately called it in- Ah, here are your colleagues now.”

Two uniforms, Ortiz and Tucker (Samson knew them from the 1-8), entered, shaking off the rain. They were followed closely by two paramedics pushing a gurney. An orderly met them at the door and directed them to Huggy’s room. The cops all acknowledged each other with nods; there was nothing that needed saying. Suicides weren’t typically dealt with the way it was depicted in the movies. In the movies, cops would brush off or even ridicule suicides. In the real world it was a different story. Most cops were either religious or superstitious or combination of the two. Suicide left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths and it was rarely joked about. 

Samson’s heart sank, dropping like a stone through murky waters, further and further from the light. Mendoza paced, more upset for Samson than anything, but also frustrated at the continual back-step Jigsaw had them on. 

Samson struggled to retain a calm demeanour. He was shaking. This was no good. He didn’t enjoy being out of control, and yet, here he was. He turned on Dr Nolan, “Don’t you people… Don’t you have protocols to avoid this type of thing?”

“Of course. But you must understand we are government funded, which means we are underfunded. We perform regular checks and mitigate danger where we can, but if a patient is dead-set on taking their own life… well, short of catching them in the act there is very little we can do to stop them. Mr Martin was very badly traumatized as we understand. His ordeal was extreme.”

The walls started closing in on Samson. “I gotta get some air. You got this, yeah?” He gestured to Mendoza as he moved for the door. 

“Yeah, Sam. All good.”

Samson stormed outside, furious. He stopped at the top of the stone steps, leaning against a pillar and grinding his jaw. His breathing was ragged, he knew he needed to calm down. His doctor had warned him about this. The high stress life and shitty diet was eroding Samson’s body from the inside. 

_This shit gonna give you a heart attack, Sam. Chill your ass out!_

He watched as Huggy was loaded into the back of the ambulance. The uniforms headed back up the steps to get out of the rain. 

“You OK there, Detective?” Tucker noted Samson’s flushed face. 

“Yeah, oh, no… That motherfucker was my closest lead on this Jigsaw bullshit.”

Tucker nodded, knowingly. “Tough break. Fuckin’ Jigsaw is, ah… He’s rubbing it in our goddamn faces.”

Samson calmed, adjusted his jacket and pulled himself together. “Yep, that he is.”

The blue Taurus rolled up to the front of the hospital, Hoffman exited but did not close his door. He stood in the rain, watching the ambulance drive out of the hospital grounds. 

Samson acknowledged Hoffman with a nod. Hoffman just stared back. _This fuckin’ guy gives me the goddamn creeps…_

Tucker broke the silence, “We’re gonna go take statements. See you in there.”

Samson gave a weak smile as the uniforms left. Now he was alone with “Spooky” Hoffman – an unofficial nickname he’d picked up ever since the death of his sister’s murder, Seth Baxter. It was a riff on the Fox Mulder nickname, but it suited Hoffman better. 

“What happened?”

Samson couldn’t fathom why Hoffman was just standing in the rain getting wet. Maybe to uphold the whole spooky mythos he’d cultivated. Whatever the reason, it was disarming.

“Huggy killed himself. Second time in the trap must’ve broken him.”

Hoffman scoffed, “No great loss then.”

Samson rubbed his face, consternation rising again. “Yeah, except he was my strongest lead. This case just got set back God knows how long.”

“ _He_ was your strongest lead? What about Amanda Young? She’s the hook.”

 _Is this motherfucker pushing me?_ Samson took a deep breath, not ready to break in front of Spooky Hoffman just yet. “Yeah, yeah she is. But Huggy was our hook to her. She or John or whoever has seen us coming every time, but maybe he provided an alternative avenue. Maybe a more effective one.”

Hoffman took this in, processed it slowly. The rain intensified and the thunder boomed ever closer – the storm was coming back around. 

“Well, we’ll never know now. Sorry you lost your lead, detective. Tough break.” Hoffman got back in his car without saying anything further. Samson felt relief as the Taurus rolled out of the hospital grounds. 

Mendoza appeared by Samson. “Uniforms got statements covered. At first glance it’s open and shut, but we’ll see. Who was that?”

“Hoffman.”

Mendoza made a face, “Spooky? What did he want?”

The wind had picked up and it was getting cold out here. Samson turned to head back inside, “No clue. Dude’s strange.”

Mendoza wasn’t arguing with that.

***

Huggy’s funeral was big. It felt more like a politician’s funeral than that of a street hustler. The entire Massey Collective showed, so many people that the church could not contain everyone, and a crowd of mourners huddled under umbrellas out the front of the building. High Top had pride of place at the front of the room, along with Tierra-Alexus and Huggy’s top girls, Shadow and Simone.

The preacher had said his piece, some fluff about God’s love and being at peace with the universe. He invited the friends and family to step up to the mic. High Top took position. Before him, in a sea of black, was his whole empire. Everyone he trusted and cared about was here right now.

He ruminated, _be a good time for a motherfucker to take us out…_

“Aaron Nathaniel Martin, or Huggy Burrr as most of us knew him, was my friend. He was a loyal motherfuckin’ soldier in the Corps, and one helluva good earner. His ass got snatched from us by a white devil – and I mean devil in every sense of the goddamn word – twice!”

The crowd was becoming animated. People were rocking, some clapped, other yelled out encouragement to High Top.

“Twice, my boy survived. Twice he overcame this Bitch-saw trap bullshit. But it took its toll on a nigga, and now he’s gone from this world by his own hand.”

High Top paused to wipe his teary eyes with a silk kerchief. The crowd responded to his show of emotion. The tension in the room increased, tighter and tighter like a rubber band being pulled too far…

“My brother sits in the house of the Lord now, rolling dice and slangin’ hoes in heaven, leaving us down here, all the emptier for his absence. Brothers and sisters, my heart is broken! Let me hear what we do when someone breaks our heart!”

The murmuring in the crowd rose in volume, a couple of louder voices shouted out above the hubbub.

High Top wasn’t satisfied, “I said: TELL ME WHAT WE DO WHEN SOMEONE BREAKS OUR HEART!!”

The church exploded into a cacophony of violent expletive-ridden roars as every person screamed out their desire for bloody vengeance to the heavens. This was the response High Top was chasing. He raised his arms into the wall of sound, encouraging the intensity.

The preacher squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. This was not what the house of God was all about, but he wasn’t about to turn on this crowd. God would forgive him for allowing this occur. There was no need to become a martyr today.

High Top gestured for quiet and the crowd settled. “Thank you, my fam. It bolsters a brother to receive your love. And so, as a reward for your loyalty, I’m offering ten motherfuckin’ stacks to anyone who brings me the head of the devil responsible.” 

This was news to the crowd and an excited murmur replaced the enraged one.

“Ten large to the one who kills Jigsaw.”


	9. Strange Bedfellows pt. 2

Kyrzos’ Deli was quiet this morning. It was 8am, the deli had been open for an hour but no-one had come in yet. 

“Argh, this bloody weather, eh?” Kyrzos bustled away behind the counter, stacking and arranging the meats and cheeses, grumbling to himself about the rain. Miloš swept the floor and Delephine leaned on the counter with her chin in her hands dreaming of a life filled with sunshine, amazing shoes, and swimming pools. 

The little bell above the door clanged – this sound animated Kyrzos, “Good morning! Good morning! Welcome!” He called out to his first customer of the day without looking up. 

“Coffee, please.” 

Delephine turned to grab the pot, “Usual?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

Kyrzos recognized the voice. He threw his hands up in the air with a flourish, like a conductor, addressing Hoffman directly, “Please have a seat, Detective Mark. I will make for you fresh.”

Hoffman pulled up a seat by the window. He loved this place. Called it his hidden gem, didn't share the location to many. Didn't want it overrun with hipsters. Delephine brought him a hot cup and he cradled it, watching the rain. Rainy mornings in the city always reminded him of his favourite cop movie, Se7en. The meticulous planning and brutal execution of the seven deadly sins spoke to his Catholic upbringing, and Brad Pitt’s aggressive, body-on-the-line policing style got his blood buzzing in his veins. As much as he admired Kevin Spacey’s John Doe killer, the final scene where Brad blows him away for killing his pregnant wife always got him punching the air and yelling his approval at the screen.

John found the movie distasteful. This confused the hell out of Hoffman. It was literally a precurser to their own-

His train of thought was interrupted as a gaudy baby-blue Silver Seraph Rolls pulled up out front. The black-clad driver opened an umbrella and ushered High Top out from the back seat, hurrying to keep up with the man’s long strides from the curb to the deli. Two massive bodyguard types exited the vehicle without umbrellas and followed close behind. 

The bell clanged again as the men entered. Kyrzos became more animated, “Welcome, welcome!”

High Top made a beeline for Hoffman. “You got some fat-ass cajones on you, officer.”

Hoffman wasn’t moved in the slightest. He took a sip of the shitty brown water Delephine had served him and gestured to the chair next to him. “Sit down.”

High Top pulled the chair out, making a big show of dusting it off with a fine silk kerchief drawn from his jacket pocket. “Not often a king gets summoned by a peon. Under normal circumstances, this disrespect would come back to haunt your ass.”

“These aren’t normal circumstances. Now take a seat. And put your dogs back in the car, this is supposed to be surreptitious.”

High Top didn’t like being ordered around, especially by a fucking cop. But Hoffman was no ordinary cop, theirs was no ordinary relationship. He had to play these little games with him occasionally. 

He snapped his elegant manicured fingers and the goons exited the deli and jumped back into the Rolls.

“You got me. Now what?”

Kyrzos landed the plate down in front of Hoffman, the burgeoning sandwich struggling to contain the pile of meat stuffed between the bread and cheese. “One pastrami for you, and for your guest?”

High Top waved a hand dismissively, “I aint hungry.”

Kyrzos bowed and backed away, “Of course! Please just yell out and I’ll whip up something incredible for you. Enjoy.”

Hoffman picked up the sandwich and chomped down into it. High Top observed with disgust.

“You a fuckin’ vegetarian?” Hoffman spoke as he chewed. 

High Top leaned back in his chair, putting some distance between himself and the chewing. “Nah, bitch. I just aint about to watch a motherfucker eat when he’s supposed to be talking. I’m busy as fuck. Get to your goddamn point.”

Hoffman put the sandwich down and touched a napkin to the corners of his mouth. “This place is one of the city’s hidden gems. It changed my life when I discovered it, and now… Now, I’d fight to protect it.”

“That is a sad life.” High Top snorted in mirth. 

Hoffman forced out an ironic smile which came across as more of a rabid sneer. High Top hated this fucking guy. He was arrogant and vicious and had the badge to protect him, but they were bound together by fate.

“You’re missing the point.” Hoffman’s smile-sneer twisted downward into a deep scowl. 

High Top returned the scowl with one of his own, “No, I’m just choosing to not give a fuck about it. You’re pissed about the bounty.”

Hoffman nodded, “Yes. Yes, we are.”

“Yeah well, I’m pissed about Hug, and his moms. Besides being close personal friends, they were some of my top earners. I fuckin’ told your ass, and told you to tell your motherfuckin’ master, to keep your goddamn hands off Massey. What y’all done is bigger than our deal. Hug was a fuckin’ legend. You don’t cut down a legend without expecting some sort of fallout.”

Hoffman picked his sandwich up and kept eating, knowing that it was putting High Top on edge. He spoke with a mouthful, causing the other man to screw up his face and look away. “What if I told you we didn’t give a fuck about our deal anymore, hm? What if I told you that He’s got his eye on _you_?”

High Top was shocked. Nobody spoke to him like this without expecting a bullet in response. He opened his mouth to retort but the rage choked the words in his throat. He sat, shaking with anger, on the verge of a complete meltdown. On the one hand he could easily murder Hoffman, and any other cop for that matter, and walk away without reprisal. On the other, murdering Hoffman the detective was a very different game to murdering Hoffman the Jigsaw protégé. Jigsaw had a way of getting to folks, and he wasn't bound by any alliances. That’s why he was the scariest motherfucker ever produced by this city. Even more so than Rifkin, Berkowitz, or Giuliani, and that was saying something.

Hoffman enjoyed seeing this. He was a master button-pusher. He could find the deepest-rooted insecurity in any person and exploit it. The source of all of High Top’s insecurities was his ego. He may have been the most powerful gang leader in New York right now, but Hoffman had him wrapped around his little finger, which basically made Hoffman the most dangerous man in New York. 

A year ago, when the MPD was getting close, John had demanded the use of third parties to facilitate the kidnapping stages. With all the attention being placed on the Jigsaw murders he wanted to create some distance between their operation and the MPD. Hoffman used his street connections to link up with Massey Corps and theirs had been a lucrative relationship. Until now. 

High Top knew Hoffman was playing him. He took in a couple of deep breaths and let his heart-rate drop a little before responding, “The only reason your ass aint divided up into hefty bags on your way to landfill is cos I decree it. We have a deal, one that you came to me practically fuckin’ begging for. And now you just gon' slip it in like I’m a passed-out prom date? You need to give me a good motherfuckin’ reason to keep my temper about this shit.”

“Drop the bounty, our deal will continue. With an extra provision.”

The last word hung in the air, reverberating in High Top’s ears. “Go on.”

Hoffman finished his coffee, wincing as the shitty brew slid down his throat. _What the fuck is up with the coffee in this city?_

“Korbin and his crew are comin’ up on Massey. They want that turf.”

Dallas Korbin had started out as a small-time band promoter and meth slanger. He was also a neo-Nazi. He’d united all the skins in the city with his underground parties and had accidentally become something of a Führer to the community. For the first time in decades, the neo-Nazi movement was gaining real ground in the city. And all because of some low-rent promoter with so little imagination that he literally stole his whole name from Bruce Willis’ character in The Fifth Element – not because he thought it was a particularly good movie, but because Bruce Willis with bleach-blonde hair made him look like a cool-as-fuck space Nazi from the future.

Everyone was shaking their heads over how this could even happen, but the eventual answer was that neo-Nazis are mostly fucking dumbshits with no imagination or intellect, and are easily swayed by any person with little bit of rhetoric up their sleeves.

Fucking Nazis. What a waste of oxygen.

“We got their ass covered. We aint shook over a handful of tweakin’ white boys with shitty haircuts.” This was a lie. Korbin’s crew was stepping on Massey almost every week now. High Top was coming under pressure from his people to quell the situation.

Hoffman grinned knowingly, “There’s no need to posture here... This is me you're talking to. We know each other, and we know each other’s business. You need Korbin gone, I need that fucking bounty gone.”

High Top sucked a tooth, dismayed and somewhat disarmed by Hoffman’s astute appraisal of the situation. 

“That Nazi nigga just vanish, that’ll cause a war and they gon’ come for Massey. We can take ‘em, but we don’t want the heat a war’ll bring.”

“What if he doesn’t just vanish? What if he turns up in a trap? Massey’s kept clean, your problem vanishes, and in turn…”

High Top’s head started nod involuntarily – a tic that he couldn’t shake. It meant he could see the sense in this plan and Hoffman knew he had him on the hook.

“You’d put that piece of shit in a trap? What if his ass beats it?”

Hoffman’s smile made him look like a hungry alligator, “He won’t.”

“Goddamn. That’s cold. Your boss’d have something to say about that, I’m sure.”

Hoffman’s smile vanished. He wiped his mouth and scrunched the napkin up, tossing it onto the now-empty plate. “I’m the only boss in this game. The Jigsaw title passes to _me_. Any day now. I will make happen what needs to happen, to make this shit…” he made sweeping gesture between him and High Top. “…disappear.”

Hoffman sat patiently, allowing High Top’s brain to process and analyze the information just passed on to him. He could see the cogs turning in the gangster’s mind, watched the micro-reactions in the small muscles of his face and around his eyes. Hoffman knew High Top’s answer before High Top had even reached the conclusion of his thought-journey. 

“OK.” High Top stood and adjusted his jacket. He gave a barely perceptible nod out the window and his driver came rushing to the deli, umbrella open and ready.

Hoffman stood and held out his hand. High Top shook it without hesitation.

“I’m putting a lot of goddamn faith in you, officer.” 

Hoffman smirked. The word ‘officer’ was offensive to a decorated detective like him, and he knew High Top knew that.

“Faith is for people who gamble with their own existence. I prefer a more pragmatic approach.”

High Top dropped a couple of bills on the bench and headed to the door. His driver pushed it open, holding it for his boss. 

“Enjoy that sandwich on me. I’ll be in touch.”


End file.
